MICROORGANISMS don’t organise unions in the workplace. They don’t need sick
leave, they don’t file lawsuits if their environment becomes unhealthy. They
don’t ask for maternity leave and above all, they don’t get a pay cheque. Even
so, they work around the clock for us, doing some of the dirtiest jobs
imaginable. But microbes are just one of our natural assets. We are surrounded
by plants and animals beavering away in our service.
Robert Costanza, director of the University of Maryland Institute for
Ecological Economics, and his colleagues have estimated that the market value of
the services nature provides for us is a whopping $33 trillion per year.
Some scientists dispute this amount, saying it is far too low. Others scoff at
the notion of a price tag, arguing that many natural services simply cannot be
performed by humans and so are impossible to price.
But Graciela Chichilnisky and Geoffrey Heal think they have spotted a chance
to do some good and make some money. Humans have always made a fast buck
plundering nature’s resources, but in a departure from this slash-and-burn
mentality, Chichilnisky and Heal of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and
other like-minded economists are trying to find ways to invest in leaving the
biosphere well alone.
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If natural services can occupy a market niche, they argue, then people will
have good reason to conserve them. “There are ways of generating economic
returns from keeping things intact,” says Heal. Getting nature’s workforce into
the market is a two-step process, he adds. First, you must be able to transform
some of the value of the service into cash, and second, some of that cash has to
go back into the pockets of the people who actually take responsibility for
those ecosystems.
The Columbia economists needed to look no further than their own backyard to
show that the idea could work. In the Catskill Mountains to the north and west
of New York City the forest soaks up rainwater like a sponge, sending it on a
slow, cleansing trip from sky to stream to reservoir before it finally pours
forth when any of New York’s 9 million residents turns on the tap. The soil and
forests of 1600 square mile watershed do such a good job cleaning the water
supply that past mayors have bragged that the city has the “champagne of
drinking waters”.
A clean profit
But by the early 1990s it was clear that development in the watershed, which
is home to many small villages and dairy farms, had begun to take its toll on
water quality. Cities in the US must filter water unless they can meet stringent
criteria set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It was fast becoming
obvious that New York City would have to build an expensive filtration plant
unless it cleaned up the watershed.
How to turn this situation to your advantage? A filtration plant would cost
about $8 billion, with a $300 million yearly operating cost. “Make
a ten year horizon and you’re talking about essentially $11 billion,”
says Heal. Restoring the integrity of the watershed, however, would cost less
than $2 billion. “It’s not a difficult choice to make,” he says. “The
cost of building a filtration plant is so enormously high that there is very
little risk at all in trying the alternative.” The hard work of the watershed’s
forest and soils could save the city as much as $9 billion over ten
years.
Chichilnisky and Heal envisage a scheme that would allow investors to profit
from those savings without buying a single microbe, much less an acre of land.
An investor could buy a contract called a “security” from the city in exchange
for the right to a proportion (say half) of the savings the city generates by
not having to build the filtration plant. In that case, a $2 billion
investment would earn half of the $9 billion savings, or $4.5
billion, explains Chichilnisky. Over 10 years that’s $450 million a year,
giving a return on the investment of 22.5 per cent. Most of us don’t have
$2 billion lying around, but a modest $100 investment would earn
you $22.50 each year. After a little less than five years, you’d have the
$100 back and everything else would be profit. “This investor can be
anybody who wants to play in any stock exchange in the world,” she says. “The
State of New York can sell that right to one investor or millions of investors.
Those investors who buy the security can turn around and sell it.”
In 1997, New York City began its watershed conservation programme, buying
strips of land adjacent to streams and reservoirs, cleaning up ageing septic
tank systems and implementing tighter environmental controls on residents and
businesses in the watershed. Unfortunately, by the time Chichilnisky and Heal
published their idea the city had already floated an environmental bond issue to
finance the project. In other words, it borrowed money. But for cities with poor
credit ratings or who need to use bonds to finance other schemes, securities are
a debt-free alternative. Heal says that when you sell securities, “the
collateral you are giving investors is not the good faith and credit of the
city, but a right to the revenues from selling water. That’s slightly more
ٲԲ.”
Selling conservation in the form of securities could become widespread if
more economists were prepared to think like Chichilnisky and Heal. Similar
financial arrangements might, for example, permit both indigenous peoples and
the environment to share in the profits generated by nature’s medicine cabinet.
“In the past 15 to 20 years, probably something like 30 per cent of all
successful new drug leads generated by the major drugs companies in the US have
come from bioprospecting,” says Heal.
Consumers in the US spend at least $6 billion each year on medicines
originally derived from tropical plants. Most pharmaceuticals companies and
governments try to abide by the biological diversity convention passed in the
1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which calls for a “just and equitable”
sharing of the benefits of biodiversity. But critics accuse scientists and their
companies of engaging in “biopiracy”, claiming that little, if any, of the
profit ever trickles back into the communities where specimens originated
(see “Whose booty is it anyway?”, 91av, 21 June 1997, p 50).
Heal and Chichilnisky would like to see more agreements such as the one made
in 1992 between Costa Rica’s National Institute of Biodiversity (INBio) and
drugs giant Merck. In return for plant and insect extracts and other samples,
Merck gave INBio a $1.14 million research and sampling budget,
undisclosed royalties on any new drugs that emerge, and technical assistance and
training for Costa Rican scientists. In turn, INBio agreed to donate 10 per cent
of the up-front payment and half of any royalties they receive to conservation
efforts in Costa Rica.
Many conservationists see this as an ideal arrangement, but it is not a
realistic model for other bioprospecting deals because institutes like INBio and
governments like Costa Rica’s are the exception in developing countries.
“Anybody who ever looked for the big deals to be the mainstay of equitable
bioprospecting looked in the wrong corner,” says Michael Balick, director of the
Institute for Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden. “You do have big
companies like Shaman Pharmaceuticals doing things for
conservation—supporting traditional cultures, supporting conservation
areas, putting money into local economies—but mostly you have a series of
scattered initiatives, very small steps which may in the end help people realise
that the forest is worth more standing than destroyed.”
Chichilnisky has suggested that pharmaceuticals companies could raise cash
for these initiatives by selling securities in exchange for a share in future
royalties. But the snag is that the royalties may never materialise and, even if
they do, the payback will be a long time in coming. “Developing new drugs is an
extremely random process,” cautions Heal. Researchers commonly plough through 10
000 samples before they make a “hit”. What’s more, the average drug will take
around 12 years and between $300 and $400 million to develop. Even
though such investments may seem hugely risky, people are starting to make them.
Last year, Shaman Pharmaceuticals raised $14 million by offering
investors the choice of a dividend or a share in future royalties of a new drug
based on a tropical plant in the last phase of clinical trials.
No need to depend solely on bioprospecting as tropical forests’ cash service
crop, though, argue Chichilnisky and Heal. In addition to providing genetic gold
for biotech bounty hunters, tropical forests could be commercialised for the
role they play in controlling the planet’s climate. “A growing tropical forest
can sequester somewhere in the order of 10 to 13 tonnes of carbon per hectare
per year,” says Heal. That’s of very real value to a world facing a global
warming of between 1.5 and 4.5 centigrade in the next century, thanks to the 20
billion tonnes of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere every year.
Carbon credits
The Kyoto Protocol, signed in December 1997, binds industrialised nations to
reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by an average of five per cent (compared
with 1990 levels) by the year 2012. The protocol contains vaguely worded
sections concerning carbon “sinks” that suggest that the signatories might set
up a global emissions trading market where a country could get credit for
changes in land use that result in a net reduction in atmospheric carbon.
Likewise, their emissions budget could be reduced after changes that increase
CO2. In other words, there would be financial benefits in growing
trees—whether at home or abroad—and penalties for deforestation.
No one will get credit for anything before 2008, when this portion of the
protocol takes effect. But before negotiators even set foot in Kyoto, North
American energy utilities started jockeying for position. In 1995, a group of US
and Canadian power companies backed Nature Conservancy, an American conservation
organisation, in its bid for a 14 000 acre patch of rainforest in Belize,
outbidding a group of local Mennonite farmers who had plans to grow soya beans
on the land. “If the Kyoto Protocol does come to be, you’re talking about
amazingly significant reductions [in CO2 emissions],” says Noel
Cutright of Wisconsin Electric, which invested about $1.5 million in the
project. “We need a variety of options to address the CO2 ܱ.”
Other, similar arrangements between non-profit making and utility companies dot
the tropical landscape—in Ecuador, Costa Rica and Paraguay to name just
three.
Commodity brokers are already anticipating a market worth billions of dollars
a year. There seems little doubt that rich western countries would pay well for
credits to allow them to continue using energy intensive technologies at home.
But unfortunately the politics are not so simple. Developing countries may not
be willing to use their forests as pawns in a game that could hold back their
own progress. Add to that the difficulties of measuring carbon sinks in standing
trees and predicting the rates of sequestration in forest of various ages and
types, and you begin to see why many experts doubt that a global emissions
trading market will ever be a reality.
Chichilnisky’s prognosis is clear. “Humans have the ability to destroy in a
few years the massive infrastructure that supports the survival of the human
species on the planet, the global habitat to which humans have adapted optimally
throughout the ages,” she wrote in a recent UN report. The only real way to
change that in a market-driven society is to harness those market forces, albeit
carefully, in the fight for conservation. The services nature provides may
indeed be incalculable, but sharing the profits from nature’s bounty with people
who have a stake in it may be enough to tip the scale in favour of
conservation.
SOME natural assets are obvious money spinners. You don’t need a Columbia
professorship to cash in on the demand for nature-based adventure travel.
Ecotourism can be bad news for local people and the environment, but at its best
it pumps money into developing economies, creates jobs and encourages local and
foreign interest in conservation.
In northern Natal in South Africa, for example, Dave Varty and Alan Bernstein
bought 17 000 acres of marginally productive farmland, tore down the fences
ripped out the non-native vegetation, and built four luxury lodges, called the
Phinda Private Game Reserve. They then stocked the reserve with “the big five”:
leopards, elephants, rhino, buffalo and lions.
Farmers in this low rainfall area used to make around $13 per hectare
of land each year. Now that same hectare earns $280. There are more jobs
for the locals than before and their incomes have increased fourfold, from
$70 to $280 per person each year. The land too has benefited. With
the native animals and plants restored, the original habitat is flourishing.
Varty’s company Conscorp owns 17 other luxury lodges throughout Africa. One
way it balances the commercial drive for ecotourism with the needs of local
people and habitats is by leasing land. One such agreement with some Masai in
Kenya gives the tribe 10 per cent of the turnover from the lodge (about
$250 000 a year) in return for use of the land. The Masai have used the
cash to build schools and clinics. The deal also discourages poaching, since
wildlife constitutes the income base for the local community. And after ten
years, when the lease expires, the Masai have a chance to reassess the benefits
of this scheme.
Capital idea
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Further reading:
Development and Global Finance:
The Case for an International Bank for Environmental Settlements
by Graciela Chichilnisky, United Nations Development Programme,
Office of Development Studies Discussion Paper Series, 1996